Company Values are key phrases that define the motives behind your company’s purpose: Who you are and why you do what you do.

The Why

Your company’s decisions are all based around your success. However, achieving that success through honesty and integrity is very different than achieving it through cutting corners and deceit. These can result in very different outcomes in the eyes of your employees and customers.

Think of how the “faceless corporation” is portrayed in our culture. I remember having to watch a documentary in high school about how many corporations would be considered psychopathic. (Wow, The Corporation came out in 2003). When we think of businesses like these, we’re not invested in their success; we just shop there for the cheap socks.

Finding a business with values that resonate with your own has the opposite effect. You want to see them succeed, you’re proud of being a loyal customer, and you’re much more likely to recommend them to a friend. This is the type of relationship your company values can build for you!

The Who

When deciding your company’s core values, it’s important to involve as many people as you can. Don’t just work through these with your executive team—you may end up with a list of values that your employees don’t agree with, which can be dangerous for maintaining company culture.

Employees work best when they feel like the business aligns with their personal values because it helps them understand that they’re a part of something they truly believe in, rather than just a place to get a paycheck.

The How

There are several ways to create or find your company values, but here’s the activity I used to define ours. Get your pencil and paper ready; reading this alone won’t get you any results.

*This activity is adapted from TapRoot’s Live Your Core Values exercise. As a note, I prefer to follow the below steps because I find that when people are choosing values from a list, they’re more likely to choose values they think they should select, rather than thinking of the ones that are truly important to them.

Step 1: Have as many people as you can on your team write out a list of as many personal values they have in 5 minutes. These should not be decided with the business in mind. If something’s important to you, write it down!

You’ll end up with a list that looks something like this:

Honesty

Integrity

Innovation

Excitement

Drive

Fun

Creativity

Originality

Diversity

Change

Flexibility

Balance

Fairness

Equality

New Ideas

Selflessness

Challenges

Growth

Communication

Kindness

Relationships

Opportunity

Room To Make Mistakes

Understanding

Trust

Step 2: Next, you want to split these into categories. Don’t put too much thought into this; follow your gut feeling. You’ll end up with 3-6 categories that look something like this:

Honesty

Integrity

Diversity

Fairness

Equality

Selflessness

Communication

Kindness

Relationships

Understanding

Trust

Innovation

Drive

New Ideas

Creativity

Originality

Change

Challenges

Growth

Excitement

Fun

Flexibility

Balance

Opportunity

Room To Make Mistakes

Step 3: Next, for each list, choose a word from within the category that you think best defines the entire category. This step may seem difficult, but it’s important again to trust your gut. Which of these words really sticks out to you? You’ll now have a few words in front of you like this:

Trust

Growth

Opportunity

Step 4: Next, think of a quick phrase for each of these categories that you think could be applied to the business.

Foster a culture of trust

Empower employees to grow with the business

Create opportunity in the community

Step 5: Finally, have everyone on your team present their ideas. You’re likely to find a lot of similarities between employees, which will help you narrow down the selection to 5 or 6 core values your company will thrive on.

Remember: employees and customers are much more engaged with a brand that shares their personal values. However, don’t just pick values you think your customers want you to have. People can see when a business isn’t being genuine.

]]>You’re thinking of getting a new website done for your business and you keep hearing the buzzwords “Responsive Web Design” thrown around. Sure, it sounds great, but is everyone talking about the same thing?

Think to yourself, for a moment, about the time you’ve spent browsing websites on desktop and on your mobile device. How similar have your experiences between the two been?

Let’s look at the differences between desktop and mobile from a structure standpoint:

Desktop:

Reading: Desktop screens are wider, so we’re more likely to read the information from left to right, and then from top to bottom. Knowing this, an optimized desktop layout can show more valuable information on the left side of the screen.

Passive Consumption: Desktop websites have more room to play with, which means including passive elements like background videos, hover effects, and scrolling effects can greatly increase the immersion and interaction of the viewers.

Show Off: Not only can you inspire your viewers to interact more—the extra space allows you to really show off. Use the space to showcase what sets you apart in your industry and ensure you stay top of mind when the time comes for your customer to purchase.

Mobile:

Scrolling: A common theme in these three points come from how Social Media has evolved. Mobile websites are skinnier and taller, which means we will spend much more time scrolling through the pages looking for specific content.

Touch: On mobile, we have to interact with our fingers, which means the things we touch had better be large enough to interact with easily. You remember the last time you tried clicking on one of three super skinny buttons stacked right on top of each other, don’t you?

Swiping: From the overall interface of your phone’s app screens to those long nights on Tinder, we’ve learned that swiping left and right will get us where we need to go. Have you ever come across a photo gallery on a phone that wouldn’t swipe through images and you had to click the arrows? What is this, the middle ages?

Below are the three faces of responsive web design. We’ll call them Cluttered, Sparse, and The Twins.

Cluttered

This is the face you get when you try to take a website that looks fantastic on desktop and jam it into mobile dimensions. Sure, you’ll probably get all of the information in there, but you may run into one or more of these problems:

Hover Effects: If you have elements that transform on your desktop, such as buttons that change from an icon to the wording, what you’ll end up with is a customer who has to guess that the icon of the cardboard box means you offer moving services. If they have to click on these buttons to find out, they’ll probably leave before clicking a second time.

Excessive Scrolling: You’ve got a neat display of 8 of your products in 2 rows of 4. However, in order to show the necessary amount of detail on mobile, you’ve decided to stack them all in a single-file column. Are your customers willing to scroll past pages of products to get to the next section?

Oceans of Text: A sentence that takes up 1 line on desktop might become 2 or 4 or 6 lines on mobile. What may be a short company history on your home page becomes what feels like pages and pages to scroll past on mobile. People tend to avoid reading long blocks of text, which means you run the risk of your viewer looking elsewhere.

Sparse

The lesser-known cousin of Cluttered. This is the face you get when your responsive web design goes the opposite direction; stretching fantastic mobile designs into desktop dimensions. You aren’t going to suffer from the above issues, but you may be missing out on huge opportunities.

Empty Pages: Mobile design helps direct people to the correct places quickly, which usually means there isn’t a lot of fluff to hold their interest along the way. Stretching out your mobile content may mean there’s just too much for them to do. The content and calls to action are there, but you’ve lost the ability to guide them.

Strategic Calls to Action: A well optimized desktop website will have well-placed calls to action to convert viewers as they browse through content. Mobile design may include some great calls to action, but putting them in the correct places on desktop is a very different art.

Forgettable: Mobile design by necessity must be more compact and simple, which means your desktop website will suffer from the loss of memorable and interactive elements. Are you missing out on side-by-side comparisons? Do your viewers feel immersed in a single moment or concept as they stumble upon the content they were looking for? If you belong to an industry where your customers look through all of your competition before making a buying decision, are they going to remember you at the end of the day?

The Twins

And so, we come to our third and final face. As the name suggests, The Twins actually have two distinct, but similar appearances. This face is achieved when your responsive web design accounts for the differences in the two sizes and optimizes for both.

Con: Right off the bat, the trouble this one brings to the table comes in the form of time and money expenses. Of course, if you treat these like two different websites, you can expect the project to be almost twice as large.

Pro: No matter where your viewer is coming from, they’ll be met with the best interface. You can keep them from leaving out of frustration, and the chances are better that you’ll create a more memorable experience for them altogether.

Zack’s Strategy Tip!

In most cases, you don’t need to make your entire website this way. Your most important page is your home page, so you can achieve similar results by paying extra attention here. If someone goes out of their way to click on your About page, it’s fine for them to read through an ocean of text; they probably wanted to.

Work on your first impression and you’ll get ~80% of the value of The Twins for ~20% of the expenses.

You’re finally ready to get started on your new website product. Think hard about how you use mobile and desktop websites, what you like and dislike, and what the minimum amount of content is to ensure a viewer can find what they’re looking for in a matter of seconds.

Remember, you can always reach out to me with any questions you have about the web design process!

]]>https://www.yastech.ca/the-three-faces-of-responsive-web-design/feed/0Website Design Showcasehttps://www.yastech.ca/website-design-showcase/
https://www.yastech.ca/website-design-showcase/#respondSat, 13 Apr 2019 04:49:00 +0000https://www.yastech.ca/?p=5767Did you know that not all the websites we build go into our portfolio? We keep our portfolio clean and simple, and strategically choose projects to showcase. Each project in […]

]]>Did you know that not all the websites we build go into our portfolio?

We keep our portfolio clean and simple, and strategically choose projects to showcase. Each project in our portfolio highlights a different design or development feature that we want to show off.

Every website we design and develop though, is done with care and is something we are proud of. In this post, we’d like to showcase some of the other projects we have recently released. We have been working with clients across Western Canada, in various industries. Actually, most of these are businesses that are not in Saskatoon.

Without further ado, check out these beauties:

Prince Albert Smiles

A dental centre in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

Square One Consulting

Asbestos and hazardous material consulting with locations in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Imri (pronounced em-rye), also known as “M”, is a graphic designer and screen printing expert at RushOrderTees, one of America’s most popular custom apparel companies. He has more than 10 years of graphic design and color separations experience in the screen printing industry. As a graduate of the Multimedia program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, he has explored various creative pursuits, including art and design, marketing, DJing, and even producing comedy shows. He is a contributing writer for Impressions Magazine, Printwear Magazine, and ASI Central. He loves roller coasters, music, and fried pickles.

Making major purchases for your business is always an important decision. When it comes to buying production or manufacturing equipment, there are some crucial things to consider. Some of them may be common sense, others are counter-intuitive.

I spoke with Mike, the founder and CEO of RushOrderTees, to get a better understanding of what goes into these types of decisions. RushOrderTees was started in his garage in 2002, and has grown into one of the industry leaders, with over 500,000 customers nationwide and a satisfaction rate of 99.7%.

We narrowed our discussion of this topic down to 6 important tips that will help guide you when buying equipment for any business, from a truck for a construction company to equipment for a commercial kitchen. The following are excerpts from that interview. Now, let’s talk to Mike!

1. Requirements

M: Hi Mike. What is the first thing to consider when deciding on a major equipment purchase?

Mike:Hi M. The first thing is making sure you really need it. Asking yourself what your specific requirements are. You don’t want to run out and buy something just because it’s new. Consult with your department heads to find out what exactly they need.

M: Are there any advantages to being an early adopter?

Mike:For business, when something new comes out, you usually don’t want to be first to try it. It’s never what they say it’s going to be unless the technology or process has been proven. If you do go this route, usually there are some ways to negotiate a deal for yourself in exchange for taking the risk of being an early adopter, from extended warranties, discounts, acting as a reference, etc. When you’re the first one in the US to have a machine, there’s a discount for that.

2. Research

M: What’s the next thing to consider? Most people probably think of their budget when it comes to purchasing.

Mike:Research. After you come up with what you need– your requirements to grow or become more efficient– then you can go out and do your research on which pieces of equipment are right for you. Requirements and research are at the core of getting the right equipment the first time. Budget is secondary.

M: Gotcha. So doing your homework is key. What are some of the questions business owners should ask themselves when starting research?

Mike:What brands are well-known outside of your current knowledge? Have you done basic Google searches? Have you read online reviews? How many of these units are installed and working in the field today? Have you seen it in action? Did you call around to the biggest companies in your industry to find out what they use?

M: Are competitors typically willing to help?

Mike:People love giving advice. They’ll usually be more than happy to tell you about their experience with equipment so that you don’t make the same mistakes they did. There’s nothing more valuable than getting a real-life testimonial on the equipment you’re looking to purchase. Many companies are even willing to take you on a tour and show you the equipment in person if you just ask. You’d be surprised.

M: What about trade shows?

Mike:Trade shows are a great shortcut to asking many companies their experiences with various pieces of equipment you might be looking for. For us, trade shows have been a huge source of knowledge and insight into new and existing manufacturers and their equipment.

3. Budget

M: When it comes to a budget, is the main question ‘How much do you have to spend?

Mike:This question should come with really careful consideration, but I would usually go with: spend more than you want to, if you have revenue stream you feel you can count on because nothing is more important than uptime and output. We have always pushed our budgets well beyond our comfort zones in order to purchase the best equipment the industry had to offer.

M: What if you don’t have a steady revenue stream?

Mike:There’s a time in the business life cycle to go lower cost, but only before the inflection point when consistency and uptime are of the utmost importance. When we were just starting, we went the lower cost route, during proof of concept. We could have taken a big loan, but it would have been too much of a gamble. We wanted to prove ourselves first. As a business, you’re always taking risks– but they should be calculated risks.

M: So once you have the steady revenue, your advice would be to go with the higher-cost, higher-quality, known brands?

Mike:While there might be more upfront costs, they are usually more efficient and require less maintenance than their lower cost competitors. We made that decision early on, after learning the hard way with purchasing lower cost manual and automatic screen printing units and digital printing units. We already had a huge demand at that point, so the most important thing was consistency and uptime to capitalize on the opportunity. Way more valuable than any upfront savings.

4. Space

M: What about physical considerations?

Mike:Absolutely. It might seem obvious, but measure your space carefully. Think about all your layout options, think about positioning the equipment to optimize workflow. Think about moving things around if you need to. Create a floor plan on the computer that’s to-scale, and makes sure it works there. Then, make sure you can get the equipment through the door. If not, knock a few walls out, or make the door larger (laughs). We’ve had to do that a bunch of times.

5. Scaling

M: What about long-term considerations?

Mike:Once you choose a piece of equipment that you may need more of in the future, choose the one that you’ll enjoy working with as you expand your capacity because you’ll likely be buying more of the same machines for redundancy. You might like one of them and it might have some kinks you can deal with when there is just one in the building. However, what if you had 10? or 20? Can you deal with those kinks when they are multiplied?

M: I imagine maintenance considerations would go into this category.

Mike: Yes. Before buying, you should consider which brands will be around in 5-10 years if you need service or parts. And which brands use parts that are accessible to you from a Grainger or a Fastenal. This is a crucial factor that could lead to extra expenses and headaches and disruptions for years to come. Or not.

6. Relationships

M: What is something you think business owners might overlook when buying equipment?

Mike:This one is more important than people might realize: develop and maintain a great relationship with the manufacturer or distributor. You want somebody who will be available when you need them, pay special attention to your specific needs, and of course, give you a great deal.

M: Thanks, Mike. Good talking with you.

Mike:You too, M. Thanks.

To see more about this great site where you can make a custom t shirt design, with no minimums and free shipping, check out RushOrderTees here!

]]>https://www.yastech.ca/guest-post-ask-the-expert-6-tips-on-buying-equipment-for-your-business-with-mike-nemeroff/feed/05 Quick Tips for your First Social Media Campaignhttps://www.yastech.ca/5-quick-tips-for-your-first-social-media-campaign/
https://www.yastech.ca/5-quick-tips-for-your-first-social-media-campaign/#respondWed, 13 Mar 2019 17:38:29 +0000https://www.yastech.ca/?p=5447Check out these quick tips on how to start your very first ad campaign. Whether you’re on Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media platform, these tips will apply to […]

]]>Check out these quick tips on how to start your very first ad campaign. Whether you’re on Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media platform, these tips will apply to you.

1. Gather Your Social Keywords

In the world of SEO, keywording plays an important role in your global rankings on the internet while also helping potential clients find you better. To find your industries’ keywords, I’d recommend browsing your competitors’ websites to see the type of lingo they’re using in their header content. This should give you a good indication of the words their clients are typing into Google.

2. Network with Influencers to mutually benefit from creators in your industry:

Industry influencers are professional social media users sharing relevant posts in your industry. An example of this would be a tech inspired Instagram user posting new technology, software updates, and tips that their followers would be interested in. Because of these influencers’ large following, getting them to do sponsored posts with your advertisement could create content for them, while redirecting viewers to your page.

3. Measure your Stats

Keeping track of what works and what doesn’t is extremely important for the future of a campaign. Learning what resonates with users can help you change your campaign along the way so your content can adapt to what works.

4. Learn the Rules, Or Get Burnt

Websites like Facebook have very specific rules when it comes to running ad campaigns. For example, the rules about doing giveaways and the methods you use to conduct them could get your posts removed. Because of all these little rules, it’s good to know them so you don’t have to cut your first campaign short.

5. Connect Your Social Media to Your Website

Where are your ads directing your clients to? Back to your social media profile? You should be focused on getting clients to the hub of your company: your website. Getting them to spend time interacting with your website can even help your SEO.

Now that your ads are ready to go, get out there and create your audience! Need more help with your Social Media? Contact us!

]]>If you’re looking for tips on how to master your Google Adwords game, you’ve come to the right place! Read through my strategies below and then watch my quick-tip videos on how to implement the strategies. You’ll have to forgive the audio quality—I’m new to voice recording!

Enjoy!

Connect Analytics

Unsurprisingly, Google Analytics and Google Ads work extremely well together. If you’re tracking goals on your website such as purchases, contact form conversions, or video watches, connecting the two will allow Google to show you how many people went from one of your specific ads all the way through to completing a goal.

This can help you make tough decisions like whether or not a poor-performing keyword is worth keeping just because it has a high number of impressions.

Google Analytics provides the absolute best data to let you know if your ad campaigns are reaching the results you envisioned for them. They can even estimate financial success if your goals are associated with a dollar value.

To learn how to connect Google Analytics to your Google Ads, click here

NOTE: As I was writing this article, I spoke to Google on the phone and it looks like sometimes Google Ads doesn’t count the conversion data being pulled in from Google Analytics. In this case, I had to set up a specific Google tag for each of my conversion events on the individual target landing pages.

Exact Match will only serve your ad to those who type in “Pizza Graphic Jeans” while Phrase Match will serve your ad to anyone who searches anything that includes “Pizza Graphic Jeans”, such as “Pizza Graphic Jeans New York”

To learn how to toggle between Broad Match, Exact Match, and Phrase Match, click here

Use Call to Actions

Any marketing professional can attest to the power of a call to action. You want your ads to appeal to a certain sense of urgency in your target audience—to give them something to do.

The difference between “We’re The #1 Dentist” and “We’re the #1 Dentist | Book Your Appointment Today” can be the deciding factor between an impression and a click.

To learn how to set up Call to Actions on your Google Ads, click here

Set Up Dynamic Ads

Google’s new dynamic ads take your logos, images, headlines, etc. and organize them in different ways, giving favor to the ones that perform the best.

The largest benefit of dynamic ads is their ability to analyze what the user is searching, show the most relevant string of headers and descriptions, and then direct them to the most relevant landing page you’re using.

The ads will draw landing page options from the other ads you’re running, or you can create options from categories or page feeds you’ve created.

To learn how to set up Dynamic Ads on your Google Ads, click here

Add Some Ad Extensions

The more information your ad can provide to a potential customer, the more likely they are to click it. Utilize any extra information that’s relevant to your business from the following list:

Location

Affiliate locations

Callout extensions

Call extensions

Message extensions

Sitelink extensions

Callout extensions

Structured snippet extensions

Price extensions

App extensions

Most businesses running ads for their website have a phone number, multiple relevant pages, and compelling calls to action, but some of the less common extensions are extremely powerful, as well.

If your business has an app, direct some traffic there. If your website has products with concrete prices, show them off! Give your customers everything they need to make the right choice—your business.

To learn how to set up Extensions on your Google Ads, click here

Consider your Relevance

Google Ads gives each of your keywords a quality score between 1 and 10. This score is based on the following criteria:

Expected clickthrough rate: Google makes predictions based on how your keywords have done before. As a result, this criteria can take the longest to change.

Ad text relevance: This criteria considers your keywords in relation to other keywords and the ad itself. Factors that lower this score include keywords that are too broad, or an ad that covers too many topics.

Landing page relevance: As always, Google’s definitions can be very vague. Landing page relevance looks at the entire landing page experience. The algorithm is looking for keywords, original content, ease of navigation, and how long people are staying on your page. If your visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for within seconds, Google will know.

The following sections will target relevance and how you can improve your strategy.

To learn how to view Google Ads keyword relevance, click here

Set Match Type and Add Negative Keywords

We can’t always foresee how our keywords might go wrong, but consider these three match-type issues:

Broad Match: You’ve set the keyword “Brands” as broad match. Because broad match shows your ad to any search including your keyword, you’re now serving ads to people searching “perfume brands”.

Phrase Match: You’ve set the keyword “Pizza New York” as phrase match. This is great because you can target searches for “Great Pizza New York” and “Best Pizza New York”, but you soon realize you’re also showing for “Pizza Graphic Shirts New York”.

Exact Match: This one won’t have an issue with the unexpected, as it will show if and only if your keyword “Furniture Ontario” is searched. While this is great for avoiding those strange edge cases, you’re also missing out on useful keywords such as “Affordable Furniture Ontario”.

All three of these match cases have their pros and cons, but here’s my advice: In my experience, Broad Match and Exact Match are more trouble than they’re worth. The best bang for your buck is a strategic combination of Phrase Match and Negative Keywords.

Negative Keyword: These are selected keywords that your Google Ad will specifically not show to. In the case of “Pizza Graphic Shirts New York”, adding the negative keyword “Graphic Shirts” will help you keep the benefits of Phrase Match, but help you avoid showing your ads to the wrong audience.

To learn how to see your Search Terms and set up Negative Keywords in Google Ads, click here

Separate Your Ad Groups

As a continuation from the last point, separating your ad groups is one simple way to solve the relevance issues for ad text.

Imagine your business sells wildly different products like tires, toys, clothing, and cosmetics. Can you think of one ad that will appeal to a person looking for any of these individual categories? If someone did click your ad, would it take them to a specific page catered to what they’re looking for? Chances are, you’ll end up creating a generic ad that just echoes your business’ main slogans.

Try creating a different ad for each specific type of product or service you’re looking to target with your ad. Once that’s done, create multiple ads so you can always test them against each other and find out what’s working the best for you.

To learn how to create multiple ads for a single Google Ads campaign, click here

Test Your Landing Page

Speaking of testing, ensure that your different ads are trying out different landing pages. Keep in mind that if someone clicks your real estate ad that says “View Our Available Homes”, they don’t want to land on a page that doesn’t display your available homes. The harder it is for your customers to find exactly what they’re looking for, the higher the chance they leave.

Keyword your headings

This one is a super powerful tool. When I search for something on Google, like many others, I find it very frustrating when the results are close to what I’m looking for, but not completely aligned.

With keyworded headings, any user that performs a Google search containing one of your keywords will actually be shown exactly what they searched within your ad.

Imagine that you’re in the automotive industry. Your customer enters into the search bar “Eco Friendly Cars”. They’re going to see a bunch of listings and ads for cars of every type, but they look at your ad and the first thing they see is “Eco Friendly Cars”. This tells them that you’ve got exactly what they’re looking for, and they’re much more likely to click through.

There are some things to be careful about, though. I’ve actually seen my competitors using this trick, but what became instantly clear is that they used the name of my company as one of their keywords. Their ad read, “Yastech | [Their name] | Website Solutions”. Whether or not this was intentional, they either tricked some of my clients into clicking their ad, gave me some free brand recognition, or both.

Another trick to consider is how your keywords will fit into your ad. If your keywords follow a specific pattern, where you could integrate them like, “Top [keyword] in Paris”, great! This will look great with “Top Coffee Shop in Paris” and “Top Cafe in Paris”, but it be suspicious when your ad reads “Top Coffee Shop Paris in Paris”. Carefully consider each keyword and how it will fit into your ad.

To learn how to set up Keyworded Headings in Google Ads, click here

If you have any questions about any of these strategies, feel free to reach out to me personally at zack@yastech.ca or give me a call at 306-249-2863!

]]>Follow these 5 tips to engage with your existing audience while attracting new potential customers organically:

Presentation is Key

Before you worry about content, you need to make sure your profile fits your brand. Cater the look and feel of your page to your specific customers.

For example, if you’re a clothing boutique, you might want to go with a sophisticated bio, minimal icons, some contact links, and maybe a quirky emoji to tie it all together. If you’re a mechanic, you’ll want straight-forward language, plenty of contact information, and no icons or extras that aren’t necessary.

Here are some examples of different Instagram profiles:

Your Posting Frequency

This will vary from business to business, so the first thing I recommend is seeing how your top-of-industry competitors are doing it. I’m not talking about your local competitors, but the Pepsi or Starbucks of your industry.

These companies will often post 2-3 times a day in addition to 5 story posts. While this may sound daunting, there are important reasons:

Almost all social media platforms use algorithms and Instagram is no exception. Frequent posting will tell the algorithm to show your posts in the trending section.

To put it simply, the more you interact on Instagram, the more Instagram is going to reward you. If your posts get plenty of comments, tags, likes, and shares, they’ll sky-rocket to the trending pages.

Post With Purpose

Engagement is key to a successful Instagram page. It’s no wonder meme and celebrity pages dominate the space—the nature of their posts is extremely engaging.

What makes them so powerful is that their pages get a reaction out of viewers, which make them like the post and want to share it with their friends by tagging and commenting.

This constant interaction boosts their pages to the top of the trending page because Instagram’s algorithms can expect consistent success.

It’s up to you to decide how your type of business should be posting engaging content. A cosmetics company might post videos of makeup tutorials, giveaways, and new product reviews. Viewers want to watch these videos, talk about the products, and share the content with their friends.

Be Social, TRULY Social.

Getting engagement on Instagram is all about using the algorithm to your advantage. Aside from posting, there is one other way to maximize your chances of getting in front of clients faces; being truly social.

The best technique for getting social on Instagram is to search trending hashtags in your field and engaging with trending posts. Often times, you’ll find people talking about products in your field or even see your competitors’ posts.

This can all be used to your advantage by doing one simple thing—engaging. Like, Comment, Tag, Share, Repost, and repeat. Make yourself a part of the online community and watch your brand recognition grow, not because of the ads you’re running, but because each of these viewers have interacted with you personally.

This engagement tells the algorithms that your page is active and a prime candidate for the trending page.

The Tactic That You Didn’t Think Of

Here’s the secret that might help you make the transition from small business to industry powerhouse (on the gram).

Social Media Influencers!

Now, this can be costly, but it’s one of the best ways of marketing online in the modern age.

Let’s face it, ads and big corporations have left a bad taste in our mouths and have made it hard to trust what we see online. At the same time, we’ve boosted our trust in influencers because they’re a familiar, accessible face that has proven themselves as a source of information in their industry.

You’ve seen this, but maybe you’ve never noticed. Take Kim Kardashian for example. She’s promoting third party products subtly throughout her timeline and being paid very well for it. Don’t worry; there are more accessible ways than celebs.

For example, in my early years of digital marketing, I was able to grow a cosmetics company by reaching out to micro-influencers in the cosmetics space. I’d offer them small amounts of money to promote my client’s products and link back to their page.

Consider reaching out to micro-influencers in your space and making some small deals. They’ve become a standard practice in social media and there are websites dedicated to finding influencers to promote your products.

Tip: Be wary of influencers who have a significant following, but low engagement.

Now, take everything you’ve learned, get out there, and take over your industry (at least on Instagram)! If you ever want to talk about marketing strategy, Yas is your #1 destination. Check out our many fantastic marketing services by clicking the button below!

]]>https://www.yastech.ca/grow-instagram-audience/feed/0How to Include Online Analytics in Your Year-End Reviewhttps://www.yastech.ca/how-to-include-online-analytics-in-your-year-end-review/
https://www.yastech.ca/how-to-include-online-analytics-in-your-year-end-review/#respondMon, 31 Dec 2018 21:44:20 +0000https://www.yastech.ca/?p=5185If you’re looking to grow your business in 2019, then this article is for you. I believe that looking back at the end of the year can help transform how […]

]]>If you’re looking to grow your business in 2019, then this article is for you.

I believe that looking back at the end of the year can help transform how successful you’ll be in the next year. Many businesses undergo quarterly reviews, but some only review their last quarter of the year to save time. I urge you to review your full year, as it’s easier to spot trends over a longer timeline.

Preparing for your review

Before you start diving into stats and analyses, it’s important to identify the intention for your review.

What do you want to learn, and why?

Are you wanting to improve your marketing?

Improve productivity?

Find efficiencies?

Answering these questions will give purpose to your evaluation.

Where to Begin

When it comes to marketing reviews, I’d suggest looking at these 3 main areas:

Google Analytics

Social Media

Lead Conversions

Google Analytics

I’ll assume you have Google Analytics set up on your website. If not, check out this guide.

There’s a lot of data in Google Analytics, and it can get overwhelming fast. The key items to evaluate when reviewing your analytics are:

Performance of your marketing campaigns

Your overall traffic growth.

Your bounce rate

Performance of Marketing Campaigns

Follow these steps to review your marketing campaigns:

First, identify the time periods during the year where you ran a marketing campaign. Maybe it was an Adwords Campaign, SEO campaign, or maybe email newsletter campaigns

Go to Acquisition->All Traffic->Channels, and choose the date range of your campaign, and check off “Compare to previous period”.

Your results will you show you stats during your campaign and the same period of time before your campaign. If you don’t feel this is a good comparison, you can also compare to last year’s stats. Do this for each identified campaign

Evaluate each campaign to determine whether it met the result you wanted. Did the campaign generate the traffic you were expecting?

Edit the date fields in the top right corner to be Jan 1 to today’s date and check off ‘Compare to Last Year’.

You’ll be able to see a percentage of growth for each of your traffic channels including direct, organic search, referral, social, paid search and others. This will give you an idea of which channels you’ve seen improvement on and which ones need more attention.

You can also review what pages on your site have been most popular or grown in traffic by doing the same date comparison on Behavior->Site Content->All Pages

Traffic analysis is a great way to see if your marketing is improving or not. Your website is the hub of your marketing wheel, so improving website traffic is a definite must.

Bounce Rate

In technical terms, Google’s bounce rate measures any session that begins and ends without triggering more than one request to analytics. In other words, this is how many people get to your website and leave without interacting with it.

The best way to get a real idea of your bounce rate is to return to the pages overview and focus on the sections depicted in the following image:

I’ll give an example analysis of our own website’s bounce rate: It’s clear that we’re seeing an increase from last year (a bad thing), but a glance at the information right below that shows me that the rate from our home page has decreased considerably (a good thing). Here’s what has changed:

We launched a new website

Our page views have increased

Our new website has many more pages than the old one

Customers are landing directly on some of our inner pages due to ads, referral traffic, social media, etc.

Over all, this tells us that we’ve been doing great work catering to our viewers that land on the home page, but that we can work on making our interior pages more interactive.

Social Media

Facebook

To find out which posts are most popular on your Facebook page, follow these steps:

Log into Facebook and open your Pages Manager

Once you’ve opened your Page, go to the Insights tab

On the left, click on Posts

Along the top, click Post Types

At the top you’ll see each Post type with their average reach and average engagement

Under this will be stats on each post

Go through your list of posts to determine which ones performed the best, and which ones had no engagement

If you ran any paid marketing campaigns within Facebook, you can also review your Promotions tab under Insights.

Other Channels

If you also use Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or Youtube in your business, you can follow a similar strategy to find out what has been most popular on those channels.

Look for trends and try to identify what has worked for you in the past. Social media is always changing, so try to stay up-to-date throughout the year.

Lead Conversions

There are two main components to tracking lead conversion. The first is generating the lead, and the second is converting that lead into a paying client.

One way we track lead generation is by using goals in Google Analytics to determine what percentage of traffic complete one of our online forms. We must manipulate this data a bit because no matter how good our spam protection is, bots or spammers find a way to fill out our forms, too.

All leads that come in, whether they completed a form on our website or called us, are tracked in a tool we use called Trello. We have lists within Trello to follow each lead through the conversion funnel. This can then help us determine how many of our leads are converting into paying clients.

There are many lead tracking tools known as CRMs, and every business seems to do it a little differently. However you track your leads and conversions, make sure you evaluate the data to make sure you’re always improving.

Now What?

Now that you know what to do, go set yourself some goals. You’ve reviewed your data from last year, now go use that to set goals and strategies to have even a better year in 2019.

While you’re at it, kick off the new year with a bang by taking advantage of some of tools and services we offer here at Yas byclicking here!

What are they?

Restricting code coming from outside or even within your website that it doesn’t recognize

Forcing your web browser to communicate only through a secure connection that can’t be bypassed or overridden

Preventing certain unsecure elements from being loaded on the website

Preventing attackers from being able to inject dangerous code into your website through your URL

With an HTTP Security Header, the Content Security Policy (CSP) will create a notification any time it picks up anything suspicious, and it won’t load that element.

How are they implemented?

Security headers can be implemented in any platform or content management system (CMS) your website is on. You can actually find tutorials on the internet for any of these, or ask your web service provider to implement this for you.

These headers are only a few lines of code, but they make a big difference!

Is this important?

Wherever there are security flaws, developers adapt to fight them. If your website’s security is on your mind, then a security header is definitely important.

Ecommerce websites that gather personal information and collect payment are some of the most important cases that benefit from this added security. We are recognized as a top E-Commerce Design & Development Company on DesignRush.

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[For developers]

What are they?

According to the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), HTTP Security Headers are HTTP response headers that your web application can use to increase the security of your application. They are able to:

Restrict the resource and scripts that a website uses, whether it be internal or external to the website. Basically whitelisting your scripts, stylings, and any other resources your website uses.

Force browsers to only communicate over a secure connection (HTTPS), and prevents the client from overriding an SSL certificate warnings (caused by an invalid or fake certificates).

Prevent iframe elements from being loaded on to the website.

Help prevent against reflected cross-site scripting attacks, which is when an attacker injects HTML and/or JavaScript elements via the website URL.

The Content Security Policy (CSP) can be the longest and most complex of the HTTP security headers available to implement. This is the policy in which you specify the trusted sources of resources and scripts. Any time a requested resource or script violates part of the CSP, the web browser will fire a POST request specifying the resource and the associated violation, while not loading the resource itself. Typically this appears in the web browser’s console.

How are they implemented?

Most security vulnerabilities can be mitigated or fixed by implementing the necessary security header. These headers can be implemented through Apache configuration files, Nginx configuration files, Microsoft IIS or whatever platform or Content Management System (CMS) you are using. There are tutorials on almost any web solution you may be using.

These security headers are typically only a few lines of code. Here’s an example for implementing a security header in WordPress (although it’s recommended to implement through your web server software). This security header is added to the wp-config.php file and doesn’t allow iframe elements:

header(‘X-Frame-Options: DENY);

Is this important?

If security is a concern on your website, security headers are absolutely important. All modern web browsers support security headers, but can vary in levels of support of headers such as CSP. Security headers are especially important on any website that deal with ecommerce, sensitive user information, private company information, etc. If you have any data to protect you should be using security headers. Vulnerabilities in security headers have been found and published in the past, but they are continually improving and more widely supported, it’s better to think of them as another layer of security then an absolute solution.

]]>https://www.yastech.ca/does-your-website-have-a-secure-header/feed/0Yas’ 12 Days of Christmas Giveaway Ruleshttps://www.yastech.ca/yas-12-days-of-christmas-giveaway-rules/
https://www.yastech.ca/yas-12-days-of-christmas-giveaway-rules/#respondMon, 10 Dec 2018 16:06:10 +0000https://90A62E10-8B4E-4725-A9A0-89FA26DF9141Here are the rules for our 12 Days of Christmas Giveaway event! Tell your friends, win some prizes, get to know some of our favorite clients, and have fun! This […]